I believe the Bible and its history of creation; therefore, I believe people are created by God and in His image.  I believe we are created with an outer, physical nature that is genetically determined, and an inner, non-physical nature that is much more fluid and malleable.  I believe the inner nature is created with certain genetic building blocks, such as temperament, talents, characteristics, abilities, and so on, which form the raw material of personality.  It is the adventure of life to grow and change, developing these raw materials into the unique package of expressions and behaviors that typify each of us as different from every other one.  I believe that each person is designed specifically for a role and a purpose in God’s eternal plan, and that each one is created as a unique expression of God Himself. 
            I consider ‘personality’ to be the term used to refer to the inner, non-physical nature and its varied outward expressions:  attitudes, tone and timbre of voice, facial expressions, gestures and body language, clothing choices, habits and preferences, vocabulary, etc.  Eventually, in our interpersonal relationships, it is this inner nature, or personality, that is seen as the person, while the outer, physical appearance loses much of its significance.  When we are asked what we know about someone, if we know them well, we usually describe them in terms of their personality rather than physical characteristics.  Personality is roughly sketched out by genetics, but the finer details are added in by our experiences, the modeling we observe and either emulate or reject, the situations we find ourselves in, the beliefs we formulate or adopt, the Holy Spirit’s influence and leading, and many other external modifiers.
            It is difficult for me to describe my own personality succinctly, because I have found myself capable of wide variations on any scale.  I am usually easy-going and calm, but have the capacity for outrage and hot-temperedness.  In groups, I am generally out-going and verbose; I also treasure, need, and actively seek periods of contemplative solitude.  I am quite responsible and dependable; I can also be impulsive and spontaneous.  I am very self-directed, autonomous, independent, and stubborn; I am also capable of humble submission to others and self-sacrifice.  I tend to be opinionated and outspoken, and have no fear of standing alone on issues that are of great importance to me.  I thirst for knowledge, information, ideas, and understanding; I automatically synthesize disparate sources.  I have an active mind, and it is always picking up projects to work on; I manufacture projects if none are presented.  I enjoy sorting and classifying details, and bringing order and congruence out of a chaotic jumble.  I am highly intuitive, empathic, and perceptive when it involves an issue I believe in or am interested in; I can be completely dense and resistant when I am opposed.  I am generally frank and honest, but can be deceitful and sly.  I think very logically and analytically; I have the soul of a poet, as well.  I suppose this list could go on and on.  On the Kiersey-Bates evaluation, I landed in the ENTJ box:  hearty, frank, loving to learn; good in reasoning and intelligent talk, with leadership propensities; sometimes over-confident.
           How are some of the major theories of personality applicable to my own development?  I am a classic exhibit for many of them, starting with Freud’s theory of the unconscious driving much of an individual’s current behavior without their being aware of its power or existence; the unconscious being full of matter from childhood that was emotionally-charged and repressed for various reasons, and is now expressed in behaviors that seem inappropriate or in conflict with conscious motives and desires.
            As an infant, I experienced a devastating emotional trauma, and the conclusions I drew from it about God, myself, others, and the world around me drove my behaviors, undiscerned, for more than three decades after the event.  Much of my problematic behavior appeared to be completely causeless and irrational, but as the core principles of the conclusions I had drawn began to be revealed, these behaviors were seen to be perfectly reasonable from that perspective.  Consequently, I have begun to actively seek underlying beliefs that may be driving behaviors in myself that aren’t making sense or don’t seem to be related to observable realities.  When these unconscious motivators are discovered or revealed to the conscious realm of the mind and heart, that very awareness makes change possible and even probable.
            As a consequence of the disruption of my familial relationships and security of place in infancy, I did not enjoy the benefits of normal, healthy personality development.  At a submerged level, I became secretive and sly, as I desperately sought to survive and avoid a recurrence of the catastrophically painful severance from all that was known and loved.  In adolescence, I became criminal, starting with small acts of vandalism and petty thefts, and expanding out into behaviors far more destructive.
            This criminality gives proof to another theory that sees the interactions we have with others and situational events as primary in the shaping of personality.  I am from a large and poor family, and occasionally one of us was given the coin purse and sent to the local grocery store for small items.  I counted it a great honor and trust when I was judged to be old enough to be sent on these errands, and I did them with alacrity.  With some regularity, I would find a random coin in the dirt somewhere along the way, and come home rejoicing and broadcasting my find.  One day, my older sister accused me of stealing these coins from the purse.  I can see it now as though it happened last night:  the whole family ranged around me demanding that I tell the truth, and me protesting my innocence with outrage; I would never have dreamed of stealing from the purse. 
            Even my mother refused to believe me and was grieved at this supposed dishonesty in me.  From then on, I was required to have the money counted before I left and to bring home the receipt and have the money counted again when I came back.  At a deep level, I drew another powerful conclusion:  there is no justice in the world, so you might as well be wrong as be right; they will treat you the same either way.  The punishment may as well be justified.  That was the root of my delinquency, or perhaps it only hardened and empowered an earlier conclusion that had been more nebulously formulated in the first trauma; at any rate, I was distinctly and negatively turned by that experience.  (I still frequently find random coins and sometimes bills lying about in my path.  I count them as God’s little tokens now.)
            I also see, in my own history, a classic proof of Horney’s theory of basic anxiety and consequent resort to neurotic styles of coping.  I actually moved between all three:  in childhood, I utilized passivity, attempting to placate those around me with whom I was forced to interact; in adolescence and early adulthood, I opted for the aggressive style, exhibiting a rebellious, defiant attitude and lawless behaviors; throughout both stages, and to a lesser degree today, my coping style at the deepest level of my being was and is to withdraw from those whom I perceive to be capable of hurting me.
            I had a clear image of a Despised Self, consequent to the trauma, and its counterpart of an Ideal Self; however, my Real Self was never known or contemplated.  All these years were essentially undergirded with a strong sense of futureless desperation, which began to manifest unavoidably in adolescence.  At the age of nineteen, I attempted to kill myself in despairing hopelessness.  Here, God intervened very directly to spare me, and personality theories don’t take Him into account, so I have been propelled out, into uncharted waters. 
            God has played an indisputably primary role as the Shaper of my personality.  He designed me, first of all, with all the genetically-determined qualities, characteristics, and potentials that compose me.  He has actively employed people, situations, and circumstances to develop and mold my inner nature, which is expressed outwardly as personality.  As He began to reveal Himself to me as Living and Active in my life, even His Word exercised a power to shape me, and I became aware of His Holy Spirit’s power to transform by enabling significant capitulations in both attitude and belief, thus altering personality and behavior. 
            I can clearly see, in my life, a proof of Piaget’s theory of schemas and Kelly’s similar personal construct theory.  As an infant, my conclusions were drawn as a result of my attempts to make sense of what had happened to me.  These conclusions formed a decidedly skewed base for all future interpretations of life experience; as my power to interpret gained sophistication, this skewed schema gained desperation.  My personal construct had self-destruct commands built into it.  It was only as God’s revelations, from new life experiences and the interpretation of them by His Spirit and His Word, began to alter my schemas and personal construct at fundamental levels, that those self-destruct commands were disabled.  The process of removing every residual trace of them continues to this day.
            As a Christian, my explanatory style, once uniformly negative, is also being changed; this change to a positive explanation for events has been one of the slowest in my experience.  It has been extremely difficult to overcome my false conclusion that Evil is supreme and Good only peripherally operative, and replace it with the opposite truth:  Good is supreme and Evil only peripherally, even temporarily, operative.  This truth is found in the Bible, but I could never have arrived at a grasp of it by my own reasoning; it required God’s gracious revelation to bring this light to me.
            I can agree with both May and Frankl in their theorizing the importance of our innate need to be able to discover meaning and purpose in life.  The despair I nearly drowned in, in my late teens and early twenties, flowed from that utter failure to find meaning and purpose for my existence; the salvation in discovering God was the tandem discovery of positive meaning and purpose for being here.  This is the foundation of an overcoming life, which transcends all acts of Evil against it.  This clear meaning and purpose even for agonizing suffering was the joy that enabled Jesus to endure the cross, despising the shame; he saw that he would, by this means, be seated again with his Father in heaven, on His throne forever.  The discovery of meaning and my place in God’s eternal purpose has enabled me, like the mythical phoenix, to rise with fresh youth and vigor from the ashes of my once-destroyed life.
            I prefer Erikson’s theory of human development to Freud’s; I refuse to see sexual preoccupations and urges as the central determinant.  Obviously, never having successfully completed the first task of Trust, being cocooned instead in a concretion of Mistrust, I predictably moved ahead into Shame and Doubt, Guilt, Inferiority, Role Confusion, and, finally, Isolation.  This is where God intervened.
            As a Christian, it seems to me, I have progressively moved backward through these same stages in corrective phases, starting with Intimacy.  Through Jesus, and the washing away of my sin by his blood, God brought me into a relationship of intimate fellowship; in this intimacy with my Creator, I began to realize my unique identity and to integrate the Despised and Ideal Selves into a Real Self.  Out of this new sense of being a whole and loved person, I began to develop competence and to take pleasure in the completion of various tasks, which is the stage of Industry.
            Successfully incorporating the Industry tasks into my adult experience carried me to the Initiative stage where I could begin to actually conceptualize a future, plan for it, and carry out those plans; I began to see myself as an equal among my peers.  From there, confidence grew, and I came into the stage of Autonomy, developing a strong sense of self, my power to choose and to do what is good and right, and to be successful.  The final stage of reconstruction, Trust, is in progress and much has already been accomplished.
            Chronologically, I am in the Generativity stage, and I am a classic proof of that theory, too.  Having raised my only child, I began to consider what I could do with the rest of my life; the prayerful exploration of those possibilities has led me to pursue a master’s degree in counseling, in order to give back to the community of man (male and female) some of the fabulous wealth of life experience that piled up while I was too preoccupied with the dailiness of the journey to notice.  I see myself now at the highest point in Maslow’s hierarchy, in that stage of self-actualization that epitomizes a rich and fulfilling life, and I give the credit for this to God alone. 
            Of the various theories of personality, I find myself least interested in the evolutionary, biological, and behaviorist approaches, simply because they take no account of the fact that man (male and female) is a far higher order than animals, created in the image of the High and Holy One; I do not discount the value of certain insights they have contributed.  I find myself most in agreement with the positive theories, emphasizing a natural development that proceeds much the same as that of a seed’s growth to maturity and fruitfulness, the spiritual dimensions of human nature, and an innate internal motivation to make sense of the world and live accordingly:  the neo-analytic emphasis on the unique Self and spontaneous growth to natural, healthy ego development; the existential focus on accepting even anxiety and unknowing as a fact of normal human life, finding meaning, purpose, and mental health in the midst of uncertainty; the cognitive emphasis on what we think and believe, and how these interpretations overlay our experiences to affect our development.
            Like Jung, I believe each person has a unique destiny in God’s over-arching purpose for His creation.  In the Master’s hand, we are formed and re-formed by inscrutable methods into who we are, billions of one-of-a-kind variations on the theme of Being:

Father, I am created,
in Your love and by Your hand.
By Your Word and Spirit,
I am conceived
and born again.
Father, Your power works in me,
and, behold, I am transformed;
I show forth Your praise and glory,
forevermore,
forevermore.
Father, because You Are,
I am.